Amused DF3 Observation
 

Pixies have exactly one HP. You might wanna buy that back up...

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Depends.

Pixie Barbarians... well... ST 17; -5 from racial template = 12; ST 12 = 12 HP; -4 from racial template = 8.

Tough little buggers...

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

I think their dungeon will be the World Shortest Dungeon!

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

If you're anything but a Barbarian or Knight, you can't buy up HP past 1.3x normal without outright buying ST.

Meaning Pixies are stuck at 1 HP until they buy ST to 6 (2HP), 7 (4HP max), and so on...

I think they're also strength-capped at 15, though obviously Barbarians get to bypass this.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Pixie Barbarians - Pictsies for short?

(Apologies to Pratchett)

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Har :)

Pixies in the Antebellum Old South: Pixie and Dixie.

As related by Hannah the Barbarian Pixie.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Reference, please? From the GURPS Basic Set I had thought that a ST 5 Pixie can buy up to 130% of 5 HP, i.e. +5 HP for a total of 6. Does DF specify that racial modifiers are applied differently from HP you normally buy? It would seem very un-GURPish if it did. 5 ST is 5 ST, and unless you have kind of racial Quirk ("decrease max HP by 4") you can buy HP up to normal levels.

Actually, the odd part is that Pixies are allowed to buy HP down so far in the first place.

-Max

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Sounds like someone ported Ellyllon to 4e and forgot that HP are based on ST.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

They aren't "Allowed" to, it's right on their racial template.

Doesn't follow. Otherwise it would be based on their HT, of 10.

They've got 1 HP because they're tiny tiny tiny people. It's the general ST of 5 that's odd.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Or don't get hit?

With such a tiny SM, you're at a penalty to hit them anyways. And if they can fly, they can dodge a fireball, I think... (but they need to be able to retreat or somesuch, yeah?)

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Ellyl in 3e had -5 ST (5) and -4 HP (6). If you apply the -4 HP to their ST, they wind up with 1 HP.

And yes, Ellyl in 3e were utterly ludicrously strong and tough for their size. Based on their weight and size, they were also apparently made of metal.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

DF3 Pixies aren't much better, but at least their HP is in the right range for their mass.

Of course, their mass suggests they're made of cast iron, but...

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

If you insist on it, I will rephrase: "The odd thing is that they're allowed to have such a trait on their racial template in the first place." Not exceptionally odd, mind you, but odd.

-Max

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Which is, however, probably an error in translation. I don't have DF3, but everything I've heard says to me that they just took Ellyllon and renamed them Pixies, and screwed up the 4e conversion.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

.

I suspect the idea is that the -4 to HP in the template in itself reduces the max as well. On the other hand, I'm with you in always thinking that the limit was HP no more than 130% of *ST*, not 130% of your individual starting HP. On that basis, even if the -4 to HP also affects your max, that 130% of 5, or 6, -4, for a max HP of 2 without raising ST itself.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

ANd then the area effect stuff kills you

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

It's not impossible to dodge an area effect attack, I'm pretty sure, as long as you can run out of it's radius.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

It is impossible to dodge an AE attack. What you can do is dodge for cover and get (at most) one yard away from where you were. If you're two yards away from the edge of the effect, you are S.O.L. And with HP 1, it only takes 6 points of damage to kill you deader than dead.

So yeah, I'd agree that pixies should probably buy up to at least HP 3 or 4, just to survive.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Seems kinda funny that hard-to-hit small guys find it utterly impossible to defend against AE effects, but okay...

What about the movie-style "running from the explosion"? I can't do that in GURPS?

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Somehow, being small should make it possible to avoid an explosive fireball? I don't see the connection there at all. In all games and movies, things like grenades and flamethrowers are acknowledged as the only way to take out things like swarms of highly mobile zombie bees.

Sure. Explosions move at close to the speed of sound, and if you have Move 300, you have a Step of 30, easily allowing you to outrun the explosion.

Pixies, on the other hand, cannot move at barely-subsonic speeds, and thus cannot outrun the exploding fireball.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Are movie-style (i.e. 'cinematic') rules in effect? If so, sure. ;-)

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Pretty sure I don't need the sarcasm, Rev.

"Dungeon Fantasy" doesn't really strike me as a realistic setting, personally.

I also don't see how it's less realistic than giving a tiny pixie a +300% to +400% boost in HP, personally.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

I have wanted to play an Ellyllon for so very long, but never had the opportunity. If I had get to pay in a DF game, Ellyllon/Pixie is at the top of my list.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

One Explosive Fireball ruins their whole day. And armor thick enough to give even 1 pt of DR weigns somewhat more what they do, to put it mildly.

Edit: I'm inclined to make Pixies manifestations of Spirits and give them IT:DR Size modifier scale effect or IT:Diffuse based on being spirits. It also moves an awful lot of the physics and biophyiscs difficulties into 'supernatural bodies' where physics and biophysics can go jump in a lake.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Realistically, small creatures and objects aren't significantly less resistant to explosions than large creatures; they may not be as tough, but they also have a lot less cross-section (for fragmentation) and volume (for overpressure). GURPS has never tried to model that effect, however.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

That's what I was thinking, but I didn't want to say it as I didn't want people to get more sarcastic with me. ;)

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Sorry. What's intended as good-natured humor sometimes comes off as biting, which isn't what I was going for.

Then slap some house rules on that puppy! There are already rules for cinematic explosions in GURPS, so just declare them in effect and you're golden.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Here you go. ;)


Name: Tanker Boile
Race: Pixie
5 1/3rd inches tall 0.066 lbs or 1 to 2 pounds depending on physics or the DF:NL write up. Blonde hair, blue eyes, dressed in a dark green almost dress and caries a wand of invisibility.

Attributes [212]
ST 5 (ST includes -5 from 'Reduced ST')
DX 15 [100]
IQ 14 [80]
HT 11 [10]

HP 5 [8] (Hit Points includes -4 from 'Reduced Hit Points')
Will 14
Per 14
FP 14 [9]

Basic Lift 20
Damage 1d-2/1d

Basic Speed 6.75 [5]
Basic Move 6

Ground Move 5
Water Move 1

Social Background
TL: 3 [0]
Cultural Familiarities: Seelie (Native) [0].
Languages: Anglish (Broken/None) [1]; Fairie (Native) [0].

Advantages [161]
Appearance (Beautiful) [12]
Charisma (1) [5]
Enhanced Dodge (1) [15]
Flight (Winged) [30]
Injury Tolerance Diffuse (Accessibility (Not in Low Mana); Flying Only; Limited Use (4/day)) [30]
Magery (3) [30]
Magery 0 [5]
Obscure (Sight) (2) [4]
Reduced Consumption (4) [8]
Ultrasonic Speech (Racial Feature) [0]
Wild Talent (Focused; Retention) [21]

Perks [1]
Pixie Shot [1]

Disadvantages [-168]
Bad Temper (12 or less) [-10]
Can't speak in normal sound range (Racial Feature) [0]
Delusion (Pursued by Can & Hook) (Minor) [-5]
Dependency (Mana) (Very Common) (Constantly; Monthly) [-25]
Jealousy [-10]
Oblivious [-5]
Overconfidence (12 or less) [-5]
Pacifism (Self-Defense Only) [-15]
Reduced Hit Points (-4) (Affects displayed score) [-8]
Reduced ST (-5) (Affects displayed score) [-50]
Sense of Duty (Nature) [-15]
Vow (Find Patra Indalusbayhs) (Minor) [-5]
Weirdness Magnet [-15]

Quirks [-5]
Dislikes Wendy [-1]
Dreamer [-1]
Forgetful [-1]
Imaginative [-1]
Nosy [-1]

Skills [41]
Alchemy/TL3 IQ/VH - IQ+0 14 [8]
Body Sense DX/H - DX-2 13 [1]
Diplomacy IQ/H - IQ-2 12 [2]
includes: -1 from 'Oblivious'
First Aid/TL3 (Pixies) IQ/E - IQ+0 14 [1]
Gesture IQ/E - IQ+0 14 [1]
Hazardous Materials/TL3 (Magical) IQ/A - IQ-1 13 [1]
Hidden Lore (Demon Lore) IQ/A - IQ-1 13 [1]
Hidden Lore (Fae Lore) IQ/A - IQ+0 14 [2]
Hidden Lore (Spirit Lore) IQ/A - IQ-1 13 [1]
Innate Attack (Beam) DX/E - DX+1 16 [2]
Meditation Will/H - Will-1 14 [2]
Occultism IQ/A - IQ+0 14 [2]
Savoir-Faire (High Society) IQ/E - IQ-1 13 [1]
includes: -1 from 'Oblivious'
Savoir-Faire (Seelie) IQ/E - IQ-1 13 [1]
includes: -1 from 'Oblivious'
Shield (Buckler) DX/E - DX+2 17 [4]
Smallsword (wand) DX/A - DX+2 17 [8]
Stealth DX/A - DX-1 14 [1]
Teaching IQ/A - IQ-1 13 [1]
Thaumatology IQ/VH - IQ+0 14 [1]
includes: +3 from 'Magery'

Spells [8]
Complex Illusion IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]
Control Illusion IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]
Dispel Illusion IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]
Illusion Shell IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]
Know Illusion IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]
Perfect Illusion IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]
Simple Illusion IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]
Sound IQ/H - IQ+1 15 [1]

Stats [212] Ads [161] Disads [-168] Quirks [-5] Skills [41] Spells [8] = Total [250]


Tanker has had a hard time of it since arriving here. Only a few people can hear her tiny voice and she's had a devil of a time with the language. The only person who has understood her is somewhat hard of hearing himself. He THINKS her name is Tanker Boile, she's looking for somebody named Petra Inndalossbayhs, and has some fear of a mixture of caps and hooks.

And seems to worship a Rodent God. ;)

WARNING!! Campaigns that use her may have Enemy: Disney Lawyers to contend with.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Indeed, I'm hard to communicate with over the internet sometimes.

There should be some house rules that aren't necessarily cinematic for dealing with small creatures and effects that really shouldn't have as much an affect on them. Being hard to hit by shrapnel is easy enough (-5 or greater to hit anyways for small SM, if I'm not mistaken), but falling damage and concussive blasts shouldn't strike a small light creature for as much damage as they do by RAW, IMO.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Nope. I just wanted something with only 1 HP, so it could be easily squished, but enough ST to have an outside chance at fighting if the player really wants. Pixies very intentionally have ST 5, HP 1. Nothing says that they can't raise ST to 15 and have HP 11, if somebody wants a monster pixie. The basic idea here is that we have a ST 1, HP 1 bug that gets +4 ST because "it's maaaagic" (and because ST 5 at least lets you carry more than a few coins). I'm willing to admit when I screw up, but this isn't a screwup.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Does it? They're about 10% of human height, which means 1% of surface area, which means you could have armor of normal thickness for 1% of the weight. If anything, Pixies should be *easier* to armor than normal humans, in terms of carrying the requisite weight of armor.

Might be hard to make it sufficiently flexible at that level of relative thickness, though.

-Max

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Is the -4 HP from the template supposed to be applied *after* the HP = 130% ST maximum? I.e. is a ST 15 pixie intended to be limited to 11 HP, or can he go up to 19 HP like any other ST 15 character?

-Max

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

But they weigh 1/1728th of normal. By being 'thick enough to provide a point of DR'. You don't do a 1/12th * 1/12 * 1/12 reduction in armor.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

I'm sorry, come again? Why would you reduce the thickness by a factor of 12 just because you're scaling down the surface area? In other words, can you back up your 1/1728th figure with references, or are you just disagreeing about how thick the armor would be?

Note that DF3 gives the weight as 1/25 normal, which makes the armor 4 times THICKER than human armor. 4 mm instead of 1 mm, or whatever, just concentrated on a smaller (Pixie-sized) body.

-Max

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

'They' meaning the pixie, or meaning the armor? If the former, this is incorrect, as the pixies provided are about as dense as metal and weigh a few pounds; furthermore, their own body weight is irrelevant to their own encumbrance levels, which at ST 5 is a full quarter of a full-sized person's. At 1/144 weight for armor with the same thickness but reduced surface area, it's not going to cause them any problems, weight-wise. If the latter, that's not reflected in the weight table, which only gives it as 1/25 weight for the armor, despite the massive DR reduction.

And yet it gives -6 DR. I think this is one instance where DF is actually *harsher* on the little guys (once one gets over their ridiculously high ST in the first place) than a more 'realistic' treatment would be. Same goes for the weapon adjustments. I'd probably go multiplicative on the DR and weapon damage bonus (e.g., 3/4, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/10 or so) *and* give full weight reductions for reducing things in all dimensions, so pixie plate would be something like 1/1000 weight. Even if they had a semi-'realistic' ST of 1 for their scale, such a weight would pose them no problems whatsoever.

Or you could just edit the racial template to leave them with 5 HP to start, and say the same magic that lets them be unreasonably strong for their size also makes them inordinately difficult to squish.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

The main problem for armoring pixies will be the physical thickness of the armor -- there's a limit to how thick you can make armor before it interferes with movement, and that limit is proportional to the size of the creature being armored. Still, something like a breastplate could plausibly be an inch thick on a human, which means 1/12 of an inch thick on an pixie, which is about DR 6.

It would be very tricky to armor the wings and still leave the pixie able to fly, however.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

This is DF. Leave the real world limits in the real world. Pixies are magical anyway.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

If we're going to ignore real world limits, there's no reason to pay attention to real world scaling of things like equipment weight.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

True. IIRC, the 3rd ed Fantasy book finessed this by saying something along the lines of "...smiths know tricks of armor construction that do not work at larger scales".

I am disinclined to worry about it. Dungeon Fantasy seems to be a 'light on rules, heavy on fun' take on GURPS, and I'm fine with that.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

True, but there's also no reason to make the consequences of such scaling *harsher* than they would be, real world, either.

I think it's assumed that pixie armor *doesn't* cover the wings, just has holes for them to poke out of...

My take - go for the simplest approximation that makes some sense, but more importantly, *allows for fun game play*.

First, allow pixies to have HP commensurate with their strength. Their structural integrity and toughness are as anomalously great in comparison to their size as their ST. So they have ST 5, effectively 25x greater (in terms of lifting and encumbrance, anyway) than the ST 1 they really should have? Okay, they're all miniature men of steel; scaled up, you'd be looking at ST 50 supers. At 5 HP to start with, they'll still be plenty fragile in the dungeon.

Second, for equipment, make the baseline assumption that for all equipment that would logically scale equally in three dimensions, weight goes as the Volume/Weight Scale, while damage bonus or DR goes by the Linear Scale; round to the nearest whole number, as opposed to always rounding down.

SM Linear Measure Linear Scale Area Scale Volume/Weight Scale
-1 1.5 yards x2/3 x1/2 x1/3
-2 1 yard x1/2 x1/5 x1/10
-3 2 feet x1/3 x1/10 x1/30
-4 1.5 feet x1/5 x1/20 x1/100
-5 1 foot x1/7 x1/50 x1/300
-6 8 inches x1/10 x1/100 x1/1000
-7 5 inches x1/15 x1/200 x1/3000

So, scaled pixie armor would be 1/1000 the weight, probably full cost due to the craftsmanship involved, and would protect the little thing (exclusive of the wings) at DR 6/10, rounded to DR 1. Lesser armor wouldn't provide any DR at all, unless Fine or enchanted. Or, you can make the armor thicker in proportion to your body, and get a higher DR, but for every level of SM you go up in linear scale, not only does the weight go up by the difference in factors, but you get assessed a DX penalty due to the awkwardness of the getup - not due to the weight, just the way it doesn't want to move around your joints, etc. So, for example, a pixie could get plate made at treble thickness (effectively the same thickness as for SM -3 plate armor) and get DR 2 from it, but it would be at the cost of a -3 DX penalty. Far better to get the suit enchanted with Fortify...

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

I think that was my point.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Well, in terms of ignoring weight, I would actually suggest doing just that, at least when you're getting down to pixie size (halflings and gnomes should reasonably be able to get full DR armor at 1/2 to 1/5 surface area and weight, with maybe a slight penalty for awkward thickness - let the Giant Equipment Perk apply to that as well). Why? Well, being at about 1/10 scale, even with a 'realistic' ST 1, pixies would have a good 10x the carrying capacity, relative to their own weight - doing pixie pyramids is easy. At ST 5, they're 25x as strong as that. So, if a human can carry his or her own body weight around at Max encumbrance, a typical pixie can carry around *250x* its own weight with about the same difficulty (ignoring how bulky or awkward this would be). Given that, and three-dimensional scaling for pixie-sized equipment, I suggest that the true DF way to go would be to say that pixie weapons, armor, etc. just have *no weight at all*, simply because their actual weight would be so negligible in comparison to the pixie's No Encumbrance level that it wouldn't impact the number of gold coins they can fly away with in the slightest.

However, I still think the way to go with DR and weapon damage bonuses is multipliers based on the linear scale factor rather than a straight subtraction, just because I don't fancy two pixies with warhammers doing less damage to each other than when they go at it with bare fists...

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

And what about fall damage?

I haven't read the Pixie species template closely, and I don't remember if they have wings or something, but assuming they don't, a Pixie should have some kind of rather good protection from fall damage.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

GURPS models fall damage somewhat (impact damage based on velocity), though it doesn't model terminal velocity effects of size as far as I know.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

One of their main advantages, they do possess Winged Flight.

Re: Amused DF3 Observation
 

Well, the damage is based on velocity and mass (as represented by HP), so it should be pretty well scaled to their HP already. But no, the greater effects of air resistance on one's fall aren't really modeled directly.